


remember that you can't save everyone

by searulean



Series: betwixt the worlds of peace and war [3]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Autistic Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Eye Trauma, Gen, M/M, Mild Blood, The serial killer stuff isn't actually a huge focus, and hanging out with markus and co and having a good time, and other autistic characters also, but watch out, connor discovering things abt himself, my oc is not the main focus of this fic (unless people like him enough then who knows), oh yeah and if you thought thesis; antithesis; synthesis had a happy ending, wait till you get a load of this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 15:39:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15246477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searulean/pseuds/searulean
Summary: '"Truth is, there’s nothing you could have done to prevent what happened. The only things you can control are the connections and choices you make now."'Post-game, humanity and android kind try to salvage their derelict relationship and deal with change. While investigating a serial killer who targets androids with heterochromia, Connor finds a strange new friend in a dumpster and discovers he has more in common with the man than he thinks. While he deals with the case and confronts Kamski about Amanda, Markus and his disciples clean up the fallout of the revolution and deal with their own issues, and Hank celebrates Cole's birthday.





	remember that you can't save everyone

**Author's Note:**

> Part of a series, but should be able to be read on its own.

_‘What’s it like? Seeing things for the first time?_ Really _seeing them. Like, a sunset.’_

_‘I’ve never seen one. I wouldn’t know.’_

_‘I’ll show you one day.’_

The wind pushes against Hank’s sunhat and he holds it on with his hand, squinting at the sunset. Hank applied sunscreen but is still pink as a lobster. He is wearing boardshorts and socks with sandals. Connor basks in the sun like a lizard, cold-blooded as androids are.

Next to Hank is an assortment of food: strawberry jam sandwiches, apples, pears, oranges, pasta in tupperware, key lime pie, all on a checkered blanket. Connor’s fingers are sticky with citrus, and he still tastes the tang of it. Behind Connor is a small cliff, where Connor knows grass grows and flowers bloom and bees huddle around them. In front of him is the ocean, where Markus and his disciples splash water at one another, Sumo with them. Kara and her family build sandcastles.

Hank has no tension in his shoulders, no bags under his eyes. He is smiling, unburdened by what fate stole from him.

It’s idyllic.

But Connor is still an investigator by nature.

Bees are extinct. Connor cannot eat or taste fruit. Hank would bring beer to any outing.

This isn’t real.

All at once everything turns to ash, and the figures of Hank and Connor’s friends are statuesque, charred black, like the remnants of Pompeii. The only thing that remains is the ocean, which laps at the blackened beach, washing up fishbones and flotsam, and from it Amanda walks, bone dry.

“Did you think it would last?”

The sun turns blazing red.

Connor wakes up.

 

* * *

 

 

A pool of red blood, stark on the snow, and a blood mural, perpendicular to one another, paint the concrete architecture of the alleyway. The mural depicts a rose, finger-painted and very small.

Connor drags a finger across the wall and samples the genetic code. “Victim’s name is Wyatt Smith. He’s a plumber.”

“Do plumbers make a lot of enemies?” Hank asks.

“I doubt this was premeditated. I’ve looked up his home address and the address of his last appointment, and this alleyway is between here and there. If you wanted to lie in wait, you would do it where you know they’re going to be, and there’s no way of predicting what route he would take coming back from a place he’s never been to before. You’d attack them at the address of the appointment, their own home, or on their usual route to the grocery store.”

“But look,” Hank says, pointing to the body lying in the recovery position, clutching a hyacinth. “This looks kind of tender for a random killing.”

“The body was moved postmortem,” says Connor. “The flower was placed in his hands afterwards.”

“Any idea what the flower means?”

“In Greek mythology, two gods, Apollo and Zephyr, competed for the affections of a young boy called Hyakinthos. Apollo was teaching the boy how to throw the discus and Zephyr sent a gust of wind towards Apollo in jealousy, accidentally blowing the discus into Hyakinthos’ head, killing him. Apollo then named the flower that sprang up from the blood spilled after Hyakinthos.”

“So it was an accidental killing. Did you look that up?”

“No,” confesses Connor. “I just like flowers.”

Hank snorts. “Dogs and flowers. How is anybody ever intimidated by you?”

“Roses have thorns, you know.”

“Yeah, speaking of, what’s the rose mean?”

“Honestly, roses can mean a lot of things. Judging by the hyacinth, though, it’s probably an apology as well. It's quite well-drawn.”

“So he stabs someone for no reason and then feels bad about it?”

“Maybe. However --”

Connor kneels down and pulls the murder weapon out of the man’s eye with a _schlick_ that makes Hank shiver. “The knife penetrated from the anterior aspect of his head all the way to the posterior aspect of his head. It did not exit the skull. The man died instantly. There are no further wounds or signs of a struggle. The perpetrator stopped as soon as this man spilled blood.”

Connor hands the knife to another policeman to be stored as evidence and kneels down, moving the split pieces of eye within the socket together. Several officers turn away.

“This eye is green. The other is brown.”

Hank nods, seeing what Connor’s getting at. “He’s got heterochromia.”

Since Markus’ rebellion, dual-coloured eyes had become trendy among androids who admire him, replacing or adjusting one eye as needed. Once the public heard of a serial killer who targets androids with heterochromia, however, the trend had died as quickly as the victims.

“So,” Hank continues, “You’re saying this guy stopped as soon as he saw human blood.”

“They forgot that humans can also have heterochromia.”

“So we’ve been looking for an idiot this whole time?”

Connor suppresses a laugh. “I suppose. This man just happened to have the wrong set of eyes and go down the wrong alleyway.”

“Yeah, lady luck does this sometimes…” Hank says, looking away from the corpse.

“Is there something wrong, lieutenant?”

Hank looks at Connor kneeled over a corpse with blood on his finger. This, he thinks, has been Connor’s _whole life._ What must it be like, to have simply popped into existence, never knowing the halcyon days of childhood? Androids were simply made and then told to get to work as housekeepers, police officers, ‘companions’, awake for barely a day and just... expected to just get on with it? Hank could barely find the effort and concentration to get up and put pants on in the mornings -- how disorienting must it be to be thrust into life so suddenly with nobody to guide you?

“I just don’t know if you should be coming back to this job.”

“I told you, Hank, I’ll be fine. I’m not squeamish.”

Hank rubs his temples. “See, that’s -- that’s the problem. All you do is look at death and gore for a living. And deal with android politics in your spare time. When I was a kid, I was looking at… I dunno. Cartoons. Weird bugs. I wasn’t desensitised to,” Hank gestures to the murder scene, “All this shit. And isn’t this just the same job you were doing before?”

“I suppose. But I’m working here by choice, now.”

“And living with me.”

“By choice.”

“Is it, though? I mean, it’s not my decision, but you’d think after all the things you’ve been through, you’d want to… I don’t know, go to the bahamas.”

Connor tries to imagine himself lying on a deckcahir in the tropics, drinking blue blood out of a martini glass. He’d be fidgety, restless, without something to do. He recalls the zen garden and the beach ‘dream’ he’d had last time he tried out hibernation mode; those places would be heaven for any human, but Connor feels safer in this bloody alleyway than he ever would in any place like those.

Besides, he was built for this. There will always be criminals that need catching, and who better to solve them than the walking forensics lab?

Connor hears a door squeak and looks over to the fire exit on the back of the building, a CyberLife supply store, that the alleyway is behind. Out of the door pokes a curious desk clerk.

“You shouldn’t be here, ma’am,” says Hank, approaching her. “It might be distressing for you.”

The woman, as well as the rest of the staff, had been questioned already, but Connor has learned by now that human curiousity is reckless and insatiable. She’s a babyfaced, befreckled lass with glasses. Her nametag says ‘Anna’. She lays eyes on the corpse and pales.

“Did the staff tell you anything of note?” he asks Hank, who had done the questioning.

“That shy girl, Anna, told me there’s a homeless android round here who she sneaks thirium packets to sometimes. Said he sleeps in a dumpster.”

Connor looks over to the dumpster and, sure enough, sees a foot poking out of the lid. A witness, a murderer, or another body? He walks up to the foot and taps it.

“Hello --”

The foot retracts and out of the dumpster tumbles an android, brandishing a bent butter knife. He’s wearing a ratty scarf and a long coat, and he’s dirty. This and his wild eyes and bared teeth remind Connor of a feral raccoon.

Connor puts his hands up. “Hold on, slow down. I’m not here to hurt you.”

The man eyes his LED and then lowers the knife a little, glancing at Hank and the waitress behind him. Startlingly, the man has no synth-skin. He’s given himself eyebrows and kept his hair, but his plastic, angular features are bare. The darker areas of plastic curve down his high cheekbones to the corners of his mouth, making him look gaunt and hollow-cheeked. He is unsteady on his feet. He grins, but it doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

“Hey! I know you. I saw you on the news. Big fan of your work, freeing all those, uh, androids,” he says, almost sounding friendly if he weren’t threatening Connor with a butter knife... Not that Connor’s remotely intimidated.

Connor fights through his self-doubt and accepts the compliment. “Oh! Thank you. What were you doing in the dumpster?”

“Sometimes these places throw out perfectly good thirium packets. Waste not, want not, am I right?” the man says, winking.

“They throw those out for a reason. It’s not safe. If you’ve ingested any, you could start experiencing serious malfunctions.”

“It’ll do in a pinch.”

He’s in need of thirium that badly? Connor looks for injuries. The man has scratched out his serial number and removed his LED, and some of his shaggy hair covers one eye. Connor thinks of the victims, who always had one eye removed. The man’s coat has blood on it.

“You know deviancy isn’t illegal any more, right? You don’t have to --”

“Skulk around like a possum?” The man clears his throat. Androids do not need to do this. “Yeah, well, maybe I just wanted to be left alone.”

“If you’re intimidated by humans, New Jericho has a majority android population.”

The man sniffs. “Not just humans. I mean, uh, mostly humans, but also androids. People.”

“I see. Do you have a name?”

The man looks at the floor and says nothing, fiddling with his scarf, still holding the bent butter knife.

“My name is Connor. Connor Anderson. I work as a detective. I’m just here to ask you a few questions.”

“Oh, yeah? And what’s in it for me, huh?”

Are suspects allowed to make demands like that? Connor looks behind him for Hank’s approval. Hank shrugs. “We could take you to a CyberLife store and get you thirium and repairs. You know, legally, without rifling through their trash.”

Connor looks at the hand brandishing the blunt, useless knife. It also doesn’t have any skin. Connor considers two options: one, the man is having some kind of malfunction and can’t activate his skin, possibly caused by the corrupt thirium in his bloodstream; two, the man chooses to look like this, supported by the fact that he kept the hair and eyebrows. The second one seems more likely, since if it was a malfunction the hair and eyebrows would not manifest along with the skin. The man’s hair is also dark purple. This level of self-modification and the robotic appearance suggests he’s not ashamed of being a robot -- but then, why hide?

Connor saves that question for later. Now, he notes a clue: self-modification to this extent is usually only a feature of Traci models. Possibly a red herring, since he’s searched his database for Tracis that resemble this strange man and it turned up empty. But Connor observes the man’s features: angular structure, strong jaw, long eyelashes, etcetera. If you cleaned the man up, he would fit current standards of attractiveness quite well. But this doesn’t prove he’s a Traci, since most androids are decent-looking at least. Kamski’s doing.

“Is, uh, is the ‘we’ you or is it some other agent? ‘Cause I don’t trust anybody except you and Markus his-goddamned-self.”

Connor tilts his head. “You trust me?”

“You broke out all those androids, so I know you aren’t gonna…” The man mimics slitting his neck with the butter knife, complete with a sound effect.

“I see. Well, I think I can do that,” Connor says, looking behind himself again. Hank gives him a thumbs up. “After you’ve come with me to be questioned.”

The man narrows his eyes at him and tightens his grip on the knife. “And what if I don’t wanna come with you first? What if I have to, uh… attend a… christening?”

Connor raises an eyebrow. “Well, we just found you next to a corpse, so that would be kind of damning.”

The man startles and looks over to the corpse, then at his own blood-covered coat, then stares at Connor for a while.

“Oh, fuck.”

Then he bolts.

“Agh, come on,” says Hank from behind, and Connor rushes after the man.

The possible Traci climbs up a fire escape ladder and runs up the stairs, the metal structure clanging, and Connor follows, almost catching up if not for the man turning around and kicking, and Connor’s own momentum throws him into it. Connor falls flat on his ass and the man runs, panting with exhaustion --

Wait. Androids don’t run out of stamina. Or need to breathe.

“Hold on!” calls Connor as he gets up and follows the man.

They jump from one building to another, the Traci stumbling each time, and Connor catches up to him again. The man is _very_ slow for an android.

They jump a few more buildings and the chase is over before it really begins as Connor sees the man lean on his knees and gasp.

“Are you ill? Why are you out of breath?”

Connor approaches slowly. The man stands up, at the edge of the roof, turned away so that Connor cannot see his face.

“Why did you run?” Connor asks.

The man sways.

“I told you I didn’t intend on hurting you.”

The man falls forward and Connor just barely manages to sprint forward and catch him by his collar. He pulls the man back and holds him by the back, and the man’s head lolls; he's fainted. Androids don’t usually enter sleep mode unless they’re in dire need of repairs.

Connor hefts the man up and into a fireman’s carry, giving him a pat. “Don’t worry -- so long as you aren’t the murderer, you have nothing but your own health to gain.”

 

* * *

 

Connor stands behind the two-way mirror, observing the possible Traci, Hank by his side.

“You think he’s the murderer?” says Hank, rocking his chair back and forth.

“He’s a suspect, and I suppose he looks shifty, but no,” Connor replies, “I don’t.”

“Oh? And why’s that?”

“It’s just… one of your ‘gut feelings’, I suppose.”

“Oh, I’m a bad influence now, aren’t I? You gonna start swearing now, too?”

“I am capable of expressing an array of curses and rude words.”

“Prove it.”

“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tit, fart, turd and twat.”

“Wh--” Hank leans too far backwards and the chair tips over, sending Hank tumbling backwards before Connor catches him.

“I’ve always been able to swear, Hank,” Connor says, grinning and helping Hank back into a standing position. “I just like to be polite around you.”

“ _Never_ do that again, young man. It ain’t right. Forbidden knowledge. It’s like when I first realised how babies are made.”

“And how is that, exactly?”

Hank glares at him. “You _know_ how they’re made.”

“Or _do_ I?”

Hank punches Connor lightly on the shoulder and says ‘yeah you do’, and Connor laughs.

“I’m going to go talk to him,” Connor says, starting to walk away.

“Ask him if he needs a change of clothes,” says Hank as he walks out the door. “He smells like shit.”

Connor nods and walks to the interrogation room. He opens the door slowly. “It’s me.”

The possible Traci snaps out of a daze, taking a deep breath before grinning and putting his elbow on the table, leaning on his hand. “Hey, it’s you. Uh, buddy.”

Connor observes him. His nose is slightly roman-bridged but upturned at the tip, low columella, slightly bent to one side as though broken at some point. Android anatomy doesn’t usually allow for that, Connor notes, but CyberLife always implements imperfections into the designs of their droids -- broken noses, moles, gap teeth, mostly superficial things as to not obstruct the Adonisian features of their models while keeping them imperfect enough to avoid the uncanny valley.

The man’s eyes are droopy, and he seems to have patterned eyebags into his own design, so at least half of the man’s disheveled appearance is purposeful. Beggars are often ignored, so perhaps this is his way of hiding in plain sight.

The man’s stress levels are as high as his thirium percentage is low: very. He stares blankly at an empty bit of wall, occasionally glancing at the two-way mirror.

Connor sits down across the table from him.. “Would you like a change of clothes? You may be incarcerated for the moment, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ask to help preserve your appearance and dignity.”

The man looks offended at the very notion, pulling his coat towards himself.

“I’m assuming that’s a no?”

The man nods.

“According to my co-workers, you don’t… smell the best.”

The man shrugs. “I live in a dumpster and shower with rain. Excuse me for not noticing.”

The man does not care about the opinions of other people. Or maybe just humans.

“Well, we’re going to have to take the coat away eventually. It has the victim’s blood on it.”

The man keeps glancing to the two-way mirror, ignoring him.

“Is there something about the mirror that bothers you?”

“No, I was just admiring my, uh, dashing looks.”

Connor stares him down.

The man throws his hands down. “Okay, fine, I don’t like the idea of people… watching me. Like… a show.”

“They could come in and talk to you in person, if you’d like.”

The man’s eyes widen and he hunches further down into his chair. “No, no. That would be, uh…”

“There’s only one person behind the mirror.”

“...Still too many.”

“Well, he does need to be here to observe. Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?”

“Maybe? I don’t know. It’s actually kind of nice in here apart from the watching. Quiet. Away from… all of it.”

Connor gives him a lopsided smile. “You could stay here for longer, if you wanted. A vacation in a jail cell.”

The man squints at him and then rubs his eyes, then stares down for a while, before finally laughing a little, his stress level going down by fifteen percent. “Oh! You’re joking. Okay.”

Now Connor is confused. “Okay to staying in a cell?”

“No! I just thought you were threatening me and I was about to shit my pants. I mean, metaphorically. I can’t physically --”

“It’s okay, I understand.”

The conversation slows again. Connor imagines the man cleaned up and unscarred, pre-homelessness, trapped in one of those capsules at Eden club as a Traci. If he has trauma related to his… previous occupation, that would explain the aversion to being watched. But Connor would have had his model logged in his database, if that was the case. Unless --

Connor does a quick network search.

“Does the name ‘Traci’ ring a bell to you?”

The man tenses. “Maybe.”

“But you aren’t a Traci currently registered in the database.”  
  
“Currently.” 

That confirms it. His search returned an early model of Tracis that were recalled to fix a defect. They were supposed to have advanced self-modification abilities to better adapt to the wants of their...  _clients_ , but something clearly went wrong. Not deviancy, something more physical: the model consumed much more power than necessary to do tasks that other models could easily accomplish, so had to ‘sleep’ too frequently to be useful. They also experienced overheating, glitches and system crashes more frequently than other Tracis. They were still working on the problem when the whole revolution happened. This man is the last of his kind, for now.

“I don’t,” begins the man, gulping before continuing, “Want to be called Traci, though.”

“Then what should I call you?”

“You can call me _yours_ ,” says the man, clicking his tongue and giving Connor pistol fingers.

Connor stares blankly. The mans’ face falls. “Okay, sorry, I don’t know why I said that. I’m not really interested in you, I was just --”

“Deflecting?”

“Making a joke! Not that you aren’t perfectly -- ugh, can you just send me to be disassembled already so I can at least have my foot removed from my mouth?”

Connor shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it. Did you work as a Traci before your series was recalled?”

“No. But I saw it. If I was functional, I saw what would happen to me if I did my job, and if I was dysfunctional, I would be… dissected. To find out what’s wrong. So… I ran.”

“Why didn’t you join the Jerichoneans?”

“Lots of people huddled in one place? Big target. Don’t like it anyway. I, uh…  I hid and slept. Then somebody woke me up and said the whole revolution was over.”

So the man has the defect of his model.

“Are you tired? Do you need to sleep at the same frequency as humans do?”

“I need a lot of things, least of all to be accused of murder.”

The man’s stress level has been slowly decreasing. Very slowly. Connor decides to cut to the chase.

“I can clear your name -- whatever it is -- if you just answer me straight. Did you kill that man?”

“No. I mean, I -- I don’t think so?”

“Then why did you run?”

“I can’t exactly prove I _didn’t_ do it, can I? Do I _look_ like an innocent person to you?”

Connor can’t say he does. “It’s not my place to judge that.”

“Isn’t that literally your job?”

Connor pauses. “...In a way. It’s my job to find the truth.”

“Well, the truth, if you want to believe it, is that I didn’t kill the guy.”

Connor evaluates what he knows. The murderer directs their hate only towards androids and had only assaulted the most recent victim by mistake. What reason would an android have to attack other androids, especially ones with heterochromia, a trait of Markus, who this android seems to like? Furthermore, this android could barely run the length of a swimming pool before fainting. Connor can’t imagine him having the energy to go around killing people.

“I believe you.”

“Well, fuck y-- you do?”

The man’s stress level drops considerably.

“It would be far too convenient for the murderer to be found in a dumpster right next to the crime scene. Tell me -- do you know anything helpful at all?”

The man starts chewing nervously on his scarf. His ratty, dirty scarf. In his mouth. Connor can practically hear Hank’s disgust from the other room.

“Where did you get the coat from? It has the victim’s blood on it.”

“...It’s mine. I don’t know how the blood got there.”

“Can I see it?”

The man huffs and reluctantly removes his coat and scarf, exposing the tattered shirt and body bare of synth-skin underneath, and hands them to Connor. Connor spreads the coat out on the table and sees a few shapes indicating finger marks, as though the blood was smeared on. The sleeves of the coat, curiously, have no blood on them, despite the victim being stabbed. How would the blood travel far enough to get on the main body of the coat, but not the sleeves near the hand that did that stabbing? It’s not like the attacker had stabbed the midsection; most of the blood spatters should be towards the top, sleeves and collar. And even besides that, now that Connor thinks about it, there should be minimal blood spatters to begin with -- the murder weapon was still lodged in the victim’s eye when they got there.

By all accounts, it doesn’t make sense.

“Honestly, I think someone is trying to frame you, and they aren’t doing the best job of it. I have just one more question: why did you try to seem so threatening when you rolled out of the garbage?”

“I thought you were… uh, okay, so maybe I wasn’t sleeping in in the garbage. Maybe somebody knocked me out. But I do live there.”

“Why are you so reluctant to tell me this?”

“Because,” the man says, “I think I know who did it. But… I don’t…”

“Want to admit it? Why?”

“I don’t remember. You can probe my memory if you want. I’m not lying.”

Connor leans forward across the table and touches the man’s forearm, receiving the android’s data, and he isn’t lying. The knock on the head must have distorted his memories -- or maybe it’s all the corrupt thirium he’d been drinking. Through the mess, Connor sees a familiar face. The android who’d helped Kara and Alice, back when they were fugitives. They've come to visit Markus in Detroit, and Connor has met them a few times.

“Have you ever met a man who talks in third person?”

“Who, Ralph? Yeah, that guy’s alright. He’s the one that woke me up after the revolution and all. He stabbed me once after that, but then he named a potted plant after me, so, uh, yeah.”

The scarred, strange android holed up in an abandoned building is exactly the kind of friend Connor would expect this guy to have.

“Do you think he’ll have anything helpful to say?”

“He’ll think it’s very knife to meet you.”

“I’m going to take that as a no.”

Connor stares at the forearm and thinks. He could try to clean up the data and see if the man got a proper view of the killer, but that might take a while if he tries to do it on his own. Luckily, he knows just the guy.

“Stay here,” Connor says, getting up from the chair. “I’m going to talk to my coworker about all this and then someone will be along to escort you to a cell. They’ll take the coat with them, too. Sorry, but it’s evidence.”

The man hunches over the table and doesn’t say anything, reaching out and fiddling with the cloth of the coat. Despite the smell, the coat _had_ been quite soft. His hair still covers one eye.

“Do you think whoever knocked you out might have done that to your face?”

The android shrugs. Connor takes that as a yes. He goes to the door before pausing and glancing back at the android. He looks… kind of pathetic, if Connor is honest. And he doesn’t seem to actually own anything, not even his own name, residence or some of his memories, except the clothes on his back, and Connor is taking that away from him. Connor feels a twinge of guilt.

“Hey,” says Connor. “Have you ever heard of Christmas?”

The android glares at him. “You mean the human holiday that nobody will shut up about?”

“Yes, that one. It’s a quaint idea. The ‘season of giving’, they call it.”

“Send a card to my cell, then.”

“I don’t know if I can do that. I can give you a present, though. To apologise for all this.”

The android snorts. “Are you gonna give me that thirium you owe me?”

Connor nods. “Eventually, yes, but I’m also going to give you a name, if you want it.”

“I’m not a dog.”

“Do you plan on choosing one for yourself any time soon?”

The android pauses. “...I thought about the name Raoul, once.”

“You just said you weren’t a dog. Doesn’t that name mean dog?”

“It means _wolf._ Kind of. Wolves are cooler.”

Edgy.

“It’s also another version of the name Ralph. I don’t know if you want to name yourself after him. Would you accept the name Noel, instead?”

The android sits there and contemplates the name for a moment, before breaking his glare with a grin. “Noel. Because it’s Christmas. How cheesy. I _love_ it.”

“Is that a yes?”

The man taps his chin. “Maybe. Let me think on it. It’s still cooler to be called ‘wolf’...”

Connor gives the man a smile and leaves him to his contemplations. He goes back to Hank and tells him about the blood smears and his suspicions that the man is being framed.

“I think the murderer attacked him, maybe twice, but his memory is shot. It could take a while to fix everything.”

Hank nods. “And by then, the killer might’ve killed again.”

“Of course,” says Connor, “I could always call Josh. He knows about this kind of thing.”

“You’re gonna bring Josh to the station?”

“Yes? I mean… maybe this isn’t the ideal place…”

Connor looks over to the android through the two-way mirror. He’s got his head on the table, apparently deciding to sleep on his name decision. With all the dirt and damage on him, he looks like roadkill.

Hank gives him a stern look. “Connor, no. He’s a murder suspect.”

“But suppose we just took him home and kept an eye --”

“What did I tell you about picking up strays?”

“You always let me look after them for a night before taking them to a shelter!”

“You know this guy isn’t actually an alley cat, right?”

“No, he’s more of a street rat. Dog. Wolf.” Connor gestures to the android. “Look at him! He looks he’s been dragged through hell and back.”

“And what if the guy stabs me in the night, huh?”

“I’ll handcuff him to something. He’s probably going to be asleep when you are, anyway.”

Hank blows air from his nose and grits his teeth, looking between Connor and the android. Finally, he relents. “You want to have a conversation with Fowler as to why you should take the smelly droid home, feel free.”

“I’m sure I can persuade him. His name is Noel, by the way. Maybe.”

“Oh, yeah, that reminds me,” Hank says, taking his gun out of his holster and handing it to Connor. “Merry Christmas.”

“A gun?”

“You’re allowed to have one now, remember?”

Connor stares at the gun in his hand. Then he shakes his head.

“I can’t accept this.”

“Are you mad because I still haven’t gotten you anything for Christmas apart from this? Because I’m working on it, I swear.”

Connor hands the gun back to Hank. He can’t trust himself with it until he’s sure Amanda won’t try to hijack his body and shoot someone with it. But he doesn’t mention it to Hank. Doesn’t want to worry him.

“I’m just… not ready for it. Yet.”

Hank narrows his eyes. He knows something’s up, but doesn’t press the issue. “Fine. But I’ll ask again soon.”

Connor looks at the man in the interrogation room again. If he were human, he’d have something like chronic fatigue syndrome, or narcolepsy, or some robotic mishmash of problems. He’s also kind of weird, but Connor doesn’t think that’s part of the defect. Connor also needs to get his Amanda problem dealt with. He wonders if he can hit two birds with one stone.

“Hank, can I borrow your car?”

“What do you need it for?”

“I’m going to see Kamski.”

**Author's Note:**

> Any suggestions for names? Noel or Raoul? Please comment down below. Also, the guy's faceclaim is Ezra Miller. Look that guy up and tell me he doesn't look like the kind of gucci-model-looking guy that Kamski/CyberLife would design. I also drew him; if you go to my tumblr, neurocanondivergent, I should have it posted there soon. He's handsome once you clean him up, I swear!


End file.
